The new facility at the grand opening of Enerkem Alberta Biofuels' full-scale waste-to-biofuels and chemicals facility at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre in Edmonton on June 4, 2014.Codie McLachlan / Postmedia, file

It sounds like science fiction — a machine that gobbles up trash and spits out an ethanol so clean it can speed a car down the highway.

This is the dream Edmonton officials have been selling for nearly a decade, even as other parts of the city’s waste management plan fell behind: the recycling facility aged, the composter roof rotted and old sewage lagoons sat untreated.

But it’s not just a dream, say Enerkem officials. It’s a careful, step-by-step world first accomplishment that can easily afford to be a few years behind. Postmedia spoke with Michel Chornet, Montreal-based vice-president of operations, to understand.

How exactly do you turn trash into ethanol?

It starts with a mixture of 20 tonnes of hot sand, oxygen and steam swirling around the bottom of the gasifier, said Chornet. The sand is at 700 C and there’s only a little oxygen. So when the trash falls in, it doesn’t burn but heats up in a flash and turns to a gas.

“You undo what nature does in a few seconds,” he said. It goes back to its basic elements — carbon monoxide and hydrogen in a very hot gas.

Step 2 is to clean the gas of any contaminates, such as the chlorine atoms that come from discarded PVC pipes. They do that with scrubbers, he said, basically a series of different water baths at varying pH levels, set at temperatures and pressures to pull out different contaminants.

That’s a cleaning system that’s been used by the chemical industry for decades.

Step 3 is to make the carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas recombine into methanol, which is the product Europeans want because that’s what they add to gasoline for their vehicles.

The gas gets heated to 220 C, then exposed to copper at the right temperature and pressure. Methanol is basically one carbon atom, four hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. It’s distilled from the gas and can be collected at this point to be sold.

Enerkem added one more step for Edmonton. They react the methanol with more carbon monoxide, then more hydrogen and get ethanol. From trash to ethanol, the whole process takes only five minutes.

Why has the project been delayed?

Edmonton’s original business plan predicted by 2012 the facility would be operating at full capacity, diverting 100,000 tonnes of waste each year from the landfill. It’s still not there, but Enerkem now predicts they’ll hit full capacity late this year.

The delay came because the company is building the first commercial-sized trash-to-ethanol facility in the world and won’t rush it for Edmonton’s timelines.

“There’s a high level of sophistication,” Chornet said. “It takes a bit of time.”

Enerkem was running a small-scale facility in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and pushed the Edmonton project back the first time because it just wasn’t ready yet to scale up the technology.

The company moved on-site in 2014 but the second delay came after it built a commercial-scale methanol facility. It stopped construction and ran that for a year, producing and selling 5 million litres of commercial-grade methanol, just to convince European clients it could be done. That got the company a contract to build a similar facility in the Port of Rotterdam.

Last summer, the company built the ethanol converter. Now it is running it intermittently, shutting it down when necessary to tweak operations and learn to couple all these major operations at a commercial scale.

A few years’ delay on a test facility like this doesn’t bother Enerkem, said Chornet. “We’ve been at this for over 15 years. We’re in this for the long haul.”

A photo showing the different parts of the Enerkem Alberta Biofuels plant in Edmonton.Enerkem, supplied

What kind of trash are you using?

Enerkem uses whatever is carbon based and can’t be recycled. That means any paper, plastics and cans that can be recycled from the blue bag program are pulled out first. Edmonton also tries to pull out the heavy, wet organic matter and table scraps for composting.

“We’re really trying to take the waste of the waste,” said Chornet. “What we’re interested in is a carbon-rich feedstock.”

Does this save a city money?

Edmonton pays Enerkem a tipping fee to take the waste. Enerkem also earns revenue by selling the ethanol.

In return, Enerkem saves Edmonton the cost of hauling garbage and tipping at the Ryley, Alta., landfill. All in, city officials say it works out to $127 per tonne for conversion to biofuels versus $111 per tonne to dump it in the landfill.

But the city also benefits from being able to claim reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It avoids letting the garbage rot and produce methane in the landfill, which is a particularly dangerous greenhouse gas. In addition, 50 per cent of the carbon in that trash is recycled into a new form of carbon, ethanol. The rest is used as heat during the process.

When the ethanol is mixed into gasoline, it reduces the amount of fossil fuels required to power a vehicle.

Chornet said the plant will produce 38 million litres of ethanol per year at full capacity, which is enough to fuel 450,000 cars per year, running with five per cent ethanol mixed with the gasoline in the tank.

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